I Don't Troll on Shabbos

It's one thing to conserve objects, concepts, institutions, symbols, or doctrines, another thing entirely to conserve the experiences they are intended to symbolize, preserve, transmit, and deepen.

Let's take an obvious example: let's say I have an encounter with the divine presence. I call this encounter "God." So long as I'm alive, I can monitor the use or misuse of the word, i.e., "exactly!" or "no, that's not what I meant!"

More generally, the higher up vertical food chain, the more language becomes... problematic, or at least we must be as precise as possible, because the chances of misunderstanding -- or miscommunication -- tend to increase.

Empirical and rational knowledge are easy enough to pass along -- or at least they used to be before the left began undermining these as well. The founding principle of the left is an attack on the Logos, and this attack is by no means limited to the religious sphere, rather, to the very possibility of knowledge and knowing, of intelligence and intelligibility. Or just say relativism. Which is a kind of crucifixion of the Word.

Time out for aphoristic back-up:

The left is a lexicographical tactic more than an ideological strategy.

A lexicon of ten words is sufficient for the Marxist to explain history.

True, but progressives have made significant progress with regard to the latter. They've got it down to one word: racist!

Reality is indeed pretty simple for the flatlander who confines himself to the horizontal world. Take even one step out, though, and things become more complex, ambiguous, and nuanced. Virtually nothing is what it appears to be.

To put it another way, to recognize verticality is to put a space between appearances and reality. But there's a twist, for the space is the reality: as Voegelin puts it, it is "penultimately ultimate." It is always in movement, and yet, it has an axis, a center, and a telos, otherwise it couldn't exist; it would be ultimate and we would be God.

Now, what -- or who -- is the center, axis, and telos? Yes, one way or another, it is you. So it comes down to defining what You is. In other words, exactly what is the human subject? What is its ontological status? You might be tempted to say it is wholly contingent, meaningless, and unimportant. But if it's unimportant, then why should we take seriously a word it says?

A word it says. It says words. Who said? I said. Who said I? God did. Weren't you listening? He said I AM. I AM is prior to IT IS. The converse is strictly impossible. No one will ever explain how objects can turn into subjects, how stones can become bread, how blood can come from a turnip, or how information can come from non-information.

This is hopeless. This post is all over the place. I started writing it yesterday, and I can't relocate the place it was coming from. But while looking, I found this one from a thousand posts ago, lightly edited:

If you don't know human history, then you're like a man with amnesia, right? Or worse, like Obama, which proves that leaders who don't know our history condemn us to relive the bad parts.

But what if you don't know your prehistory? Actually, we all implicitly know our prehistory, since we are evidently -- if evolutionary psychologists are correct -- doomed (or privileged, depending) to repeat it. We know it by way of our "instinctive" actions, inclinations, preferences, institutions, etc.

As alluded to yesterday, it is possible that we are all related to a single tribe of common ancestors that split from Africa 50,000 years ago. And who knows, maybe that tribe included a couple of elders we know of as Adam and Eve.

Whatever the case, their descendants have been wandering in the bewilderness ever since, adapting to novel environments quite different from what they would have encountered in Africa.

A group of hunter-gatherers can only sustain about 100 to 150 people before it spins off into another sitcom: "Those migrating eastward faced new environments" and "would have had to relearn how to survive in each new habitat" (Wade).

The first wave of migration was into more friendly and familiar latitudes, but humans eventually pressed northward into Europe, where "the problems of keeping warm and finding sustenance during the winter months were severe." Note that this was before the present period of comfy global warming that began some 10,000 years ago, so environmental pressures would have been exceptionally harsh: like natural selection, only worse.

Interestingly, there was also the matter of confronting the protohumans of a previous wave of migration, e.g., Neanderthals. These primitive Homos were apparently the residue of a group that had split from Africa some 500,000 years before, meaning they had been evolving independently of the new wave -- which is our wave.

Now that I think about it, it's almost like a premature birth, isn't it? Their timing was just a little bit off -- okay, half a billion years off -- so they weren't quite ready to leave the womb of Mother Africa, not yet fully half-baked humans.

Could the story of Cain and Abel be an archetypal recollection of our genocide of these distant cousins? Whatever the case, the world wasn't big enough for two kinds of humans, so Neanderthals "disappeared about the time that modern humans entered their territories."

Next time some leftist clown blames us for what happened to Native Americans or some other victim group, remind him of what we all did to the Neanderthals. End the occupation! Of the world.

In any event, once these different human groups were situated in their unique environments, "each little population started to accumulate its own set of mutations in addition to those inherited from the common ancestral population."

So, as I wrote in a comment yesterday, it is as if there is a common genetic clay that is further tweaked by unique circumstances. If the human clay didn't have this shape-shifting potential, then we'd all still be in Africa. Anyone who attempted to leave would have simply died out like a palm tree trying to live in Alaska, or like a professor trying to survive outside the artificial hothouse environment of academia.

Which leads to the question: how much of the human genome is shared, how much unique to particular groups/races? This is difficult to assess, but Wade suggests that perhaps 14% of the genome would have been subject to recent selective pressures and local adaptations. He also mentions that an analysis of the genomes of 2,000 African Americans "found that 22% of their DNA came from European ancestors and the rest from African groups..."

Another big leap occurs with the transition from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to permanent settlements around 15,000 years ago. This required a major rewiring, not so much for exterior circumstances as interior -- i.e., psychic -- ones.

Living in much more population-dense communities obviously required vastly more subtle and wide-ranging interpersonal skills, diminished aggression, delayed gratification, and a hierarchical instead of purely horizontal group organization. Are we to believe that such dramatic phenotypic changes influenced, and were under the influence of, no genotypic changes?

Indeed, fossil records show that there is a gradual thinning of our bones at this time, implying that we didn't require such heavy skeletal underarmor for the constant head-bashing: "humans shed bone mass because extreme aggressivity no longer carried the same survival advantages."

Those New Guineans mentioned in yesterday's post didn't have to remember their prehistory, because they were still living in prehistory, "using Stone Age technology and embroiled in endemic warfare." If those are the new Guineans, imagine the old ones.

It would be an interesting experiment to adopt one of those New Guinean babies and see how he does in modern society. Would he be under no genetic constraints whatsoever? That would be a rather extreme position, but if true, then Wade's ideas would pretty much be out the window.

In the Coonifesto there is a wise crack by Norbert Elias to the effect that

"It seems as if grown-up people, in thinking about their origins, involuntarily lose sight of the fact that they themselves and all adults came into the world as little children. Over and over again, in the scientific myths of origin no less than religious ones, they feel impelled to imagine: In the beginning was a single human being, who was an adult" (emphasis mine).

Well, Wade has another headslapper by Elias, that "Many people seem to have the unspoken opinion that 'What happened in the twelfth, fifteenth or eighteenth centuries is past -- what has it to do with me?' In reality, though, the contemporary problems of a group are crucially influenced by earlier fortunes, by their beginningless development."

So, it is as if there is a personal prehistory in the form of a preverbal infancy etched into our neurology, and a collective one etched into our genome.

Human Being and Being Anti-Human

We've spoken before of how the cosmos isn't any kind of empirical fact or observation, nor can it ever be. Obviously, no one has ever seen the cosmos in its totality. Rather, it is an abstraction from equations of physics that are presumed to be universal.

Thus, the cosmos -- the total and unified order of reality -- is a concept, an abstraction, an assumption. And thanks to sober thinkers such as A.N. Whitehead, we know that this concept is rooted in Judeo-Christianity, against which all those 18th and 19th century philosophers drunk on the radical Enlightenment were rebelling.

Come to think of it, those radical thinkers (we're not speaking of the moderate Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment to which we are heir) were very much like our reactionary progressives and anti-Trumpers: if it's Jewish or Christian, the opposite must be true.

For example, if we believe race to be unimportant, then race must be all important; if we believe men and women are very different, then they must be identical; if we believe in the nuclear family, it must be a quintessential form of oppression; if we believe children are entitled to a mother and father, then fathers must be superfluous; if we think liberty is impossible in the absence of law and order, they think it would be great to abolish the police. If school vouchers are the most important civil rights issue of the day, then children should be forced to attend mandatory state indoctrination centers. The list is endless.

Exaggerate much, BoB? Well, here's a handy chart yoinked from PowerLine. It's not racist at all:

White people believe in all the bad things such as individualism, self-reliance, the nuclear family, and fatherhood. Worse yet, in order to understand the world, white folks look to objectivity, cause-and-effect relationships, and quantitative analysis. In fact, I'll admit to abusing my son, because I taught him to delay gratification, plan ahead, and not waste time.

Check out some of the laughable stereotypes: we prefer our food bland, our culture European, our thinkers white, and our women Barbies. Am I triggered? Absolutely, in the sense that I'm laughing at these imbeciles.

Yesterday one of them called me racist again. I'm old enough to remember when this was just an admission that the accuser had lost the argument. Now it is the argument. Are my feelings hurt? Yes, I can't believe I have only one reader calling me racist. After 15 years of blogging, I should have hundreds by now.

Anyway, back to our subject: our cosmos. Which no one has ever seen. As it so happens, the above insultainment actually goes to our subject, because another thing no one has ever seen is mankind:

Mankind is not a given thing. Mankind stretches back into the past toward unknown beginnings. It moves into the future toward unknown times. What we call mankind is simply an idea, which arises on the occasion of certain experiences of revelation or illumination, and which is extended to all other people who do not have such insights (Voegelin).

This is a critical idea for a number of reasons. First, as we mentioned a couple of posts back, you can't blame people of the past for not understanding that all human beings are created equal. After all, Africans themselves were unacquainted with this principle, because they're the ones who kidnapped fellow Africans in order to sell them to Arab or European slave traders.

Today we understand -- advocates of identity politics notwithstanding -- that cultures vary but mankind is one. Human nature is real, and confers certain inalienable rights. The left is adamantly opposed to the principles of human nature and natural rights, not just because they can only come from the Creator, but also because they limit state power and undercut their project of inventing positive rights.

It has now become controversial -- even racist -- to suggest that some cultures are better than others. This critique itself is racist to the core, because we're obviously referring to culture, not race.

Conversely, the left, in insisting that all black people ought to think alike, conflates race and culture: Al Sharpton or Cornell West or Ilhan Omar think like Black people ought to think; Thomas Sowell or Clarence Thomas or Candace Owens aren't just wrong, they're not even properly Black.

I know. And they call us racist! Their absence of self-awareness, let alone irony, is literally disorienting. They'd no doubt call the following racist as well, despite the fact that it is the opposite, because it is again affirming the principle that Blacks are not defined or constrained by culture, just like anyone else:

We include within mankind, for example, all Africans, yet in all Africa there never was an insight that would have enabled an African tribe to conceive the idea of man or mankind. There simply was no such thing. These are Western, or at least largely Western, ideas -- classical and Christian ideas (ibid.).

The operative word isn't "African" but tribal: tribalism isn't just a form of social organization but a mode of thinking. Yes, identity politics has always been with us. Identity politics is post- rather then pre-Christian, but both subordinate universal man to particular tribe, rather than vice versa.

More abstractly, this again means that mankind is not, and can never be, an empirical object. It would be more accurate to say that man is a kind of "location" where something quite marvelous is occurring and never stops occurring. In this luminous space occurs history, creativity, civilization, philosophy, theology, everything. Indeed, what is happening is Being itself:

everything that happens and which we call history, including our idea of mankind, is happening in Being itself, which is behind all specific things and all specific happenings (ibid.).

We'll end with one of my favorite aphorisms, because it is one of the Keys to the Cosmos:

The world is explicable from man; but man is not explicable from the world. Man is a given reality; the world is a hypothesis we invent.

One of its logical entailments is that

History is the series of universes present to the consciousness of successive subjects. -Dávila

A Nation of (Vertical) Immigrants

Horizontal movement would mean little if it weren't bisected by the vertical tension we've been discussing in recent posts. America was settled by people who weren't just interested in physical space, but in a vertical space where they would be free to encounter God in ways not defined and enforced by the state.

As John Adams observed, the horizontal revolution of 1776 was preceded by a vertical revolution that had occurred a generation before. Even Jefferson pleaded for the assistance of “that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them” in this new world. He further proposed a design for the Great Seal of the U.S. depicting "the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night."

As Novak writes in his On Two Wings, revolutionary era Americans "did not believe that time is cyclical, going nowhere, spinning in circles pointlessly. They believed that history had a beginning and was guided by providence for a purpose":

Time (in the view of the founders) was created for the unfolding of human liberty, for human emancipation.

Regarding the vertical movement -- AKA exodus -- how do we know which way is which, i.e., up from down? Is this in fact a relativistic universe, or has the left always been the vanguard of intrinsic metacosmic error?

History is a record of progress (or decline), measured by permanent standards, God's standards, as learned from and tested by long experience (Novak, emphasis mine).

So, it is possible that the left isn't in error. But only if there exist no permanent standards and transcendent truths by which to judge their ideological pronouncements. How convenient.

History, for the founders, is "open, purposive, contingent in liberty." It

is not a Greek or Roman idea. It is Hebraic.... Probably most of the humans who had ever lived before the arrival of Judaism on the world stage never even heard of "progress".... For Jews and Christians, by contrast, history is heading somewhere new...

All of this is of course bound up with the nature of time: what is it? We've already alluded to Judeo-Christian time, so we won't belabor the point. There is also pre-Hebraic time. We won't belabor that point either. Suffice it to say that pagan time is circular and backward looking, toward a mythic golden age. It is gnostalgic, ordered to a paradisal time before time, about which they are half correct. For in the words of the Aphorist,

The error lies not in dreaming that secret gardens exist, but in dreaming that they have gates.

This much we can know with certainty in this life: the gate is the direction and the direction is the gate. Before Abraham was I AM surely is, and I AM is Truth, Way, Door, Bread, Life, Light, Vine, Shepherd, Resurrection.

But Liberals describe a past that never existed and predict a future that is never realized. Which explains why The liberal mentality is an angelic visitor impervious to earthly experiences. (NGD).

In the words of Petey, the left invents the past it needs in order to justify the impossible future it desires. Moreover, the present crimes of the left are purified of their criminality by the angels of Good Intention.

Back to our permanent exodus. Recall what Novak says above about history being contingent in liberty. In other words, if history is contingent -- and it is -- this is because liberty is necessary. This is a somewhat paradoxical formulation, because we normally think of liberty as that which is free of constraint. It is the necessary condition of our own contingent choices.

Here we must draw a distinction between freedom as such, which is necessary, and what we do with our freedom, which is contingent. There is a distant analogy with God, who is radically free, and yet, "constrained," so to speak, by his own nature -- by love, truth, beauty, goodness, etc. Man too is free and constrained, such that the highest expression of freedom is in conformity with the will of God -- quintessentially so in Jesus, but also in Mary, in whom obedience and freedom converge in one big YES.

"Liberty is the axis of the universe, the ground of the possibility of love, human and divine" (Novak). It is the vertical axis, although it obviously plays out and is prolonged in the horizontal. It very much reminds me of another aphorism, that

The two poles are the individual and God; the two antagonists are God and man.

In other words, man qua man, the individual person, doesn't only exist in the tension between immanence and transcendence, he is this tension. Thus, for God, there are only individuals relating -- or not -- to him in this bidirectional space.

The antagonism comes into play with man (man as such as opposed to such-and-such a man), symbolized by the fall and expressed historically in more ways than can possibly be chronicled: in ideology, identity politics, racism (and racialism), superstition, scapegoating, projection, envy, hatred, et al.

It's not possible to neatly wrap up a post like this. We'll end with some remarks by Voegelin and let you sort it all out:

the very idea that there is a humanity, that there is a mankind, and that one can generalize about man, appears only when certain revelatory insights occur. These are spiritual outbursts.... Only when spiritual insights are attained does man become defined as that being who receives his order through existence from God.

There is therefore a tremendous importance attaching to these spiritual outbursts and insights. The recipients of such insights act as representatives of humanity, with the obligation to communicate their insights to all mankind.... every new insight into order is the beginning of a revolution of more or less considerable dimensions.

In this context, conservatives who specifically wish to conserve the revolutionary insights of the founders are the radicals, while progressive leftists are the backward looking reactionaries. Advocates of these Gnostic and totalitarian movements "feel themselves to be the representatives of mankind, and they feel everyone must be converted to the representative type of truth."

Or face cancellation and exile, which is the shadow of exodus.

As inversions of the archangel in the Bible, Marxist archangels prevent men from fleeing their paradises. --Dávila

The Exodus In & Of History

As human beings meander through prehistory and history...

Well, first of all, what can we possibly say of man before taking his history? Recorded history only goes back 5,000 years or so. Prehistory goes back another 3 million years, but human history per se only begins 50-100 years ago, with the speciation event of Homo sapiens sapiens. Of course, our innocent preliterati couldn't have had any conscious awareness of this cosmo-historical event. Nevertheless it was knowable, or we couldn't know it.

Let's say we go back 100,000 years ago. Someone shows us this strange looking beast. What could we say of him aside from the fact that he is badly in need of a bath? Or that he must have escaped from Portland? Only history could reveal his potential -- for both good and ill.

Indeed, history is the revelation of human potential. It isn't something that can be rationally known from within history a la Hegel and his retarded progeny, nor is it a material process a la Marx and his awokened mob of tenured barbarians.

Rather, it is precisely that which reveals itself in the tension between immanence and transcendence. If the Oracle of the Comment Box has taught us nothing else, it is that the human adventure is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable. That is simultaneously the least and most we can say of it.

The point is that, when we examine our history, it is as if we're, say, peering into our own medical, or better, psychiatric, chart. What has the doctor been recording about us over the years, decades, centuries, and millennia? Let's see: likes to create things. Prone to impulsivity & violence. Obsessed with group status. Cannot manage envy. Prefers ideological dreamworlds over reality. Can't stop lying.

It reminds me of something Charles Murray wrote in Human Accomplishment:

We human beings are in many ways a sorry lot, prone to every manner of vanity and error. The human march forward has been filled with wrong turns, backsliding, and horrible crimes.

In the book, he attempts to quantify the great feats of human accomplishment, but it seems that for every achievement there are any humber of equal and opposite monuments to our depravity. He asks, "What can Homo sapiens brag about -- not as individuals, but as a species?":

Military accomplishment is out -- putting "Defeated Hitler" on the human resumé is too much like putting "Beat My Drug Habit" on a personal one.

Government? Please. I've lived in California my whole life, long enough to confirm Genesis 3: if megalomaniacal ideologues with good intentions and unlimited power can ruin California, then they can certainly ruin paradise.

Let's not ramble. Focus. The point -- it seems -- is that history itself is one long "speciation event." And one of the sources of tension in our age is that, for the first time in history, various subspecies are being reintroduced and forced to live cheek-to-jowl, which prompts all sorts of primitive reactions that wouldn't occur absent the contact.

For example, a couple of weeks ago the fake news fabricated a controversy regarding Mount Rushmore. Seems that some descendants of Stone Age tribes that once squatted in the area are claiming the land belongs to them, because these descendants squatted there. If this seems tautological, it's because it is. Note how they are culturally appropriating concepts of Christian civilization such as "private property" in order to assert their rights and stake their claim.

But Stone Age peoples obviously had no such concept. They knew, of course, that "what's mine is mine." But they also knew that "what's yours is mine," whether your land, your women, or your wampum. If we meet the Indians on their own cognitive ground, limiting ourselves to their own highly limited horizons, then Mount Rushmore is ours because it is ours, end of story.

The same kind of backassward thinking applies to the left's anachronistic understanding of slavery. Some of them literally believe the United State invented it. Others, such as the New York Times, imagine it is our defining feature instead of an unfortunate aberration that was totally at odds with our founding principles, condemned to be swept aside one way or the other.

But whatever it was, it wasn't a racist institution until it came under direct threat, and Democrats had to invent the concept of structural racism to explain it. They've never let go of the concept, only using it in different ways to sustain their electoral power.

Nor will they stop categorizing people by race until the practice is totally repudiated and discredited. But even then, they'll find something as a Trojan Horse for envy, hatred, cruelty, and other primitive impulses, in order to control minds and groups. It's just too effective.

So anyway, history itself may be understood as exodus WRIT LARGE. It is literally an exodus -- from animal to man, matter to spirit, biology to pneumatology, ignorance to knowledge, appearances to reality, man to God, etc. One thing we cannot say is that it is one or the other, because this collapses the tensional space in which we live and thereby curtails the exodus. Do you see why?

Marx, for example, puts the kibosh on our exodus by presuming to completely understand its material underpinnings. It is only for Special People such as Marx, or Obama, or Pelosi, to force us over to the Right Side of History that has been revealed to them.

Likewise, Darwinism in particular or scientism more generally bring the exodus to a grinding halt. If you think you're nothing more than a contingent ensemble of genes, then that's what you are. As the Master says, Each one sees in the world only what he deserves to see. Say what you want about our trolls, but their simplistic worldview is sufficient to explain themselves, at least to their own satisfaction.

Back to the main thread. Again, there's bound to be tension when diverse groups with their own interior unity and coherence bump up against one another. Now, with the internet, we don't even have to have physical contact. Twitter users, for example, we are squeezed into a tight virtual space where people are right next to people they hate. Yet they do this voluntarily. I myself tweeted for a couple of weeks a few years back, until I could no longer tolerate the smell.

Gosh, we're almost out of time. Let's wrap things up with a few relevant passages from the V man:

The completion of this idea occurs in Christianity, in which this conception of the exodus has become a fundamental category, playing a determining role in the philosophy of history...

St. Augustine formulates the problem in a way that is as valid today as ever, and "very probably will never be surpassed":

in man, in the soul, there are organizing centers [i.e., attractors]. The two principal centers are the love of self and love of God.... Between these two centers there is continual tension: man is always inclined to fall into the love of self and away from the love of God.

On the other hand, he is always conscious that he should orient himself by the love of God, and he tries to do so in many instances. Exodus is... the tendency to abandon one's entanglements with the world, to abandon the love of self, and to turn toward the love of God [AKA metanoia, vertical rebirth]. When the tension is strongest toward the love of God, then we find an exodus from the world.

Never successfully, of course. Rather, abiding in that tension-toward-God is success.

'Nuff said if you're thinking what I'm thinking: history takes place between (•) and (¶), (↑) and (↓). Who could ask for more, let alone insist upon less?

Psycho-Speciation and Red Pilling

There apparently exists something in history we might call "psycho-speciation." I can't have been the first to suggest the term.

I just googled it, and I see it is discussed by an old pal of mine, the psychohistorian Lloyd Demause. Before I redpilled a couple of decades ago, I was a true believer in his ideas, not all of which are wrong, just too reductionistic, polemical, and deterministic (among other fatal defects).

For example, he asks "What caused America?," which would be a fine question if he stopped there. But before pondering the question, he asks some additional questions that are just thinly veiled polemics in disguise:

What was it that changed a group of totalitarian, bigoted, head-hunting and witch-hunting Englishmen into a nation of fiercely independent Yankees in but one century?

Is that an accurate description of our ancestors: totalitarian, bigoted, head-hunting, and witch-hunting Englishmen? Or their descendants, for that matter? No, it is the simplistic view of a 20th century ideologue, similar in form to our contemporary progressive anachronistic anarchists who think they are morally superior to the wise and courageous men who made their privileged lives of permanent adolescent rebellion possible.

These latter folks bring to mind this tweet: "Their whole lives spent chasing status & privilege, and now denouncing 'privilege' to gain yet more privilege. If you give these people a moment's credibility, you're a fool."

In other words, there is no White Privilege like the privilege of pretending it exists in order to gain more of it.

Anyway, I don't want to get bogged down in Demause's theory of psycho-speciation. But just because he's wrong about the cause, it doesn't mean the phenomenon isn't real. His fundamental error is in positing a vertical hierarchy while denying the source and ground of verticality, which is to say, God.

In short, Demause was a secular atheist, which undercuts his whole approach. He was completely sealed in ideology but couldn't see the bugs for the feature. Which is true of any psychological theory that pretends to contain the uncontainable, AKA man.

Let's be perfectly accurate here: main is containable, but only by God. To the extent that a man pretends to contain mankind in a theory about man, he has descended into ideology. Which is intrinsically pathological. One can of course do it, but it is always an error.

Imagine being, say, a 15th century explorer. There existed any number of maps of the Atlantic Ocean, but they were all obviously wrong, since no one had actually explored the area in such a way that an accurate map could be rendered.

Now, what if emotional security is more important to you than cartographical truth? Then you'll be motivated to cling to one of the erroneous maps, which represent a kind of pseudo-knowledge about the world. The map isn't real, but the rocks you ram into will be.

Back when I was in grad school -- we've been through this before, so I'll be brief -- one of the first classes was a historical survey of all the various theories of mind ranging from behaviorism at one end to existentialism at the other. In between there is psychoanalysis (with dozens of sometimes antithetical schools), Gestalt, humanistic, transpersonal, etc. Here's a list of just the Top 45. Pick one!

On what basis?

Oh, here's a fruity one: liberation psychology. It is

an approach that aims to actively understand the psychology of oppressed and impoverished communities by conceptually and practically addressing the oppressive sociopolitical structure in which they exist. The central concepts of liberation psychology include: conscientization; realismo-crítico; de-ideologized reality; a coherently social orientation; the preferential option for the oppressed majorities, and methodological eclecticism.

Or in other words, reams of pseudo-intellectual politicized bullshit that has nothing to do with human nature and its objective pathologies. Conveniently, the theory pretends to deny the existence of universals while privileging its own.

My guess is that this is the dominant paradigm if you are unlucky enough to attend graduate school these days. I got in just under the wire, and it is still a mystery to me how I passed the oral licensing exam in 1991, which included some achingly stupid politically correct questions which I abruptly dismissed as irrelevant to my totally unwoke metapsychology.

By the way, you may wonder how it was that I was still very much a Democrat at that time, and didn't redpill until 2000. How was I unaware of the cognitive dissonance? Just 30 years ahead of the curve, I guess. Today there are obviously millions of Democrats who don't yet understand that they are supporting a totalitarian, bigoted, head-hunting, and witch-hunting political religion known as Cancel Culture.

Speaking of psycho-speciation, is red pilling itself a form it it? It could be. But there are plenty of crazy and unhinged conservatives. Unfortunately, just not enough of them.

Now, from a strictly infranatural, Darwinistic standpoint, speciation itself is quite problematic, not just horizontally but vertically, since nothing in the natural world is intrinsically any better or higher or more valuable than anything else. Which reminds me of a comment Voegelin makes in another book, which I will recast in terms of biology:

If a man says "a human being is just a contingent ensemble of selfish genes," he is a respected biologist; if a man says "I am just a contingent ensemble of selfish genes" and thereby consistently refuses to take responsibility for his actions, he is a psychiatric case.

Well, we didn't get far, and now I'm nearly out of time. We'll end with Voegelin's take on psycho-speciation, even though he doesn't call it that:

When a society gains a new insight into the true order of personal and social existence, and when it will abandon the larger society of which it is a part when it gains this insight, this constitutes an exodus. When such a higher insight is gained, the group that gains it will establish itself as a separate entity....

Whenever a new insight into order is gained, there is always the question whether to immigrate from the present order into a situation in which the new order can become socially dominant and relevant for the society that has gained the insight.

Which explains why the Dems are so frantic to import blue-pilled immigrants, and to force feed their existing plantation dwellers a daily diet of the blues.